3-Can you bring me the verse where Jesus claims to have dual natures i.e. fully man and fully God

I accept your challenge. This is the verse where Jesus claimed, or rather, admitted that he was God.

"And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God." Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believe." (John 20:28-29)

Thomas called Jesus ho karious mou kai ho theos mou, literally, the Lord OF ME and the God OF ME. So Thomas was calling Jesus his God, and Jesus blessed Thomas' profession of faith. He acknowledges Thomas' belief, and says that those who don't see and yet believe this are likewise blessed. So Jesus was expressing approval of what Thomas said.

If Jesus was not God, then what Thomas said here was blasphemy, and Jesus would have rebuked him for it, but he didn't, he agreed with Thomas. What's more, the texts says that Thomas said "to him," that is, to Jesus. He didn't call Jesus "my Lord," then look up to heaven and call the Father "my God," no, Thomas said "to him," to Jesus, "my Lord and my God," so both terms are applied to Jesus. Jesus is therefore, not only the Lord, but also the God of Thomas.

There are other places where Jesus claimed to be God, but I'll await a response to this first. I'd really like it if you could email on me email address at daleyveneita@live.com. But if you want others on this site to benefit from the discussion, so be it, post here. Thanks.

Daley, you only answered one of the three challenges. I agree that the Bible does refer to Jesus (pbuh) as God in some places, but it also refers to him as human in others as well. It never explains these inconsistencies by saying that he was "fully human and fully divine", which is the third challenge that brother Mansoor Ali stated. You didn't answer challenges 2 and 3.

Say: "Truly, my prayer and my service of sacrifice, my life and my death, are (all) for Allah, the Cherisher of the Worlds. (Surat al-Anaam: 162)

All added much later...we don't really know what the original New Testament contained.[/QUOTE]

John 20:28-29 appears in every known manuscript we have of John's gospel, so we actually have no textual evidence that this was an insertion as you claim. If you believe this document of John differs from the original manuscript, you have to give evidence that the original didn't contain this passage by citing an earlier manuscript which doesn't contain these words. Since you can't do that, your claim is an empty assertion without proof. You simply can't deal with the evidence, so you call it an insertion added later, but you give no proof to back up this claim. It appears in the Codex Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus, Vaticanus, and many others. But it also appears in very early quotes by the church fathers.

They are ways of telling when an insertion has been made, give evidence that one was made here or stop making unsupported claims.

All added much later...we don't really know what the original New Testament contained.[/QUOTE]

John 20:28-29 appears in every known manuscript we have of John's gospel, so we actually have no textual evidence that this was an insertion as you claim. If you believe this document of John differs from the original manuscript, you have to give evidence that the original didn't contain this passage by citing an earlier manuscript which doesn't contain these words. Since you can't do that, your claim is an empty assertion without proof. You simply can't deal with the evidence, so you call it an insertion added later, but you give no proof to back up this claim. It appears in the Codex Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus, Vaticanus, and many others. But it also appears in very early quotes by the church fathers.

They are ways of telling when an insertion has been made, give evidence that one was made here or stop making unsupported claims.[/QUOTE]

Sorry Daley i didn't mean to upset you.

Everybody knows that the New Testament has 'made up' verses so falsehood has been mixed up with the truth that Jesus (pbuh) brought.

With regard to the Gospel of John everybody including laymen and scholars agree that it is very different from all the other Gospels. All of a sudden John maked Jesus (pbuh) into a God, the son of God or a sacrificial lamb.

Professor of Classics and Director of the Religious Studies Program University of Texas at Austin

THE SPIRITUAL GOSPEL

John's gospel is different from the other three in the New Testament. That fact has been recognized since the early church itself. Already by the year 200, John's gospel was called the spiritual gospel precisely because it told the story of Jesus in symbolic ways that differ sharply at times from the other three. For example, Jesus dies on a different day in John's gospel than in Matthew, Mark and Luke.... Whereas in the three synoptic gospels Jesus actually eats a passover meal before he dies, in John's gospel he doesn't. The last supper is actually eaten before the beginning of passover. So that the sequence of events leading up to the actual crucifixion are very different for John's gospel. And one has to look at it in say, why is the story so different? How do we account for these differences in terms of the way the story-telling developed? And the answer becomes fairly clear when we realize that Jesus has had the last supper a day before so that he's hanging on the cross during the day of preparation before the beginning of Passover.

So here's the scene in John's gospel: on the day leading up to Passover, and Passover will commence at 6 o'clock with the evening meal, on the day leading up to that Passover meal is the day when all the lambs are slaughtered and everyone goes to the temple to get their lamb for the passover meal. In Jerusalem this would have meant thousands of lambs being slaughtered all at one time. And in John's gospel that's the day on which Jesus is crucified. So that quite literally the dramatic scene in John's gospel has Jesus hanging on the cross while the lambs are being slaughtered for passover. John's gospel is forcing us, dramatically at least, through the storytelling mode, to think of Jesus as a passover lamb. Jesus doesn't eat a passover meal, Jesus is the passover meal, at least within the Christian mind in the way that John tells the story.

Everybody knows that the New Testament has 'made up' verses so falsehood has been mixed up with the truth that Jesus (pbuh) brought.

With regard to the Gospel of John everybody including laymen and scholars agree that it is very different from all the other Gospels. All of a sudden John maked Jesus (pbuh) into a God, the son of God or a sacrificial lamb.

Professor of Classics and Director of the Religious Studies Program University of Texas at Austin

THE SPIRITUAL GOSPEL

John's gospel is different from the other three in the New Testament. That fact has been recognized since the early church itself. Already by the year 200, John's gospel was called the spiritual gospel precisely because it told the story of Jesus in symbolic ways that differ sharply at times from the other three. For example, Jesus dies on a different day in John's gospel than in Matthew, Mark and Luke.... Whereas in the three synoptic gospels Jesus actually eats a passover meal before he dies, in John's gospel he doesn't. The last supper is actually eaten before the beginning of passover. So that the sequence of events leading up to the actual crucifixion are very different for John's gospel. And one has to look at it in say, why is the story so different? How do we account for these differences in terms of the way the story-telling developed? And the answer becomes fairly clear when we realize that Jesus has had the last supper a day before so that he's hanging on the cross during the day of preparation before the beginning of Passover.

So here's the scene in John's gospel: on the day leading up to Passover, and Passover will commence at 6 o'clock with the evening meal, on the day leading up to that Passover meal is the day when all the lambs are slaughtered and everyone goes to the temple to get their lamb for the passover meal. In Jerusalem this would have meant thousands of lambs being slaughtered all at one time. And in John's gospel that's the day on which Jesus is crucified. So that quite literally the dramatic scene in John's gospel has Jesus hanging on the cross while the lambs are being slaughtered for passover. John's gospel is forcing us, dramatically at least, through the storytelling mode, to think of Jesus as a passover lamb. Jesus doesn't eat a passover meal, Jesus is the passover meal, at least within the Christian mind in the way that John tells the story.

Can you see the conspiracy working here? Can you see the handiwork of satan? Can you see man adding to Devine revelation?

First of all, even if you could prove John wrong about when Jesus died, that doesn't make him wrong about what Thomas said. All historical documents include some error, Josephus, Tacitus, Pliny, Berossus, Thucydides, etc. You still haven't shown any proof of tampering with the text of John 20:28-29. All you have done is try to divert attention to some other area in John's gospel which you think you can better argue on.

Second, your argument is not valid.

The uniform impression conveyed by the synoptic Gospels is that the Crucifixion
took place on Friday of Holy Week. If it were not for John 19:14, the point would never
have come up for debate. But John 19:14 says (according to NASB): "Now it was the day
of preparation [paraskeue] for the Passover; it was about the sixth hour. And he
[Pilate] said to the Jews, Behold, your king!" The NIV suggests a
somewhat less difficult handling of the apparent discrepancy: "It was the day of
Preparation of Passover Week, about the sixth hour." This latter translation takes
note of two very important matters of usage. First, the word paraskeue had already
by the first century A.D., become a technical term for "Friday," since every
Friday was the day of preparation for Saturday, that is, the Sabbath. In Modern Greek the
word for "Friday" is paraskeue.

Second, the Greek term tou pascha (lit., "of the Passover") is taken
to be equivalent to the Passover Week. This refers to the seven-day Feast of Unleavened
Bread (Heb. massot) that immediately followed the initial slaughtering and eating
of the Passover lamb on the evening of the fourteenth day of the month Abib, which by
Hebrew reckoning would mean the commencement of the fifteenth day, right after sunset. The
week of masso-t, coming right after on the heels of Passover itself (during which
masso-t were actually eaten, along with the lamb, bitter herbs, etc.) very naturally
came to be known as Passover Week (cf. Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th ed.,
12:1041), extending from the fifteenth to the twenty-first of Abib, inclusively. (Arndt
and Gingrich [Greek-English Lexicon, pp. 638-639] state: "This [i.e., Passover]
was followed immediately by the Fast of Unleavened Bread on the 15th
to the 21st. Popular usage merged the two festivals and treated them as a
unity, as they were for practical purposes.") It was unnecessary to insert a specific
term for "week" (such as sa-bua) for it to be understood as such.
Therefore, that which might be translated literally as "the preparation of the
Passover" must in this context be rendered "Friday of Passover Week."

It turns out, therefore, that John affirms just as clearly as the Synoptics that Christ
was crucified on Friday and that His sacrificial death represented an antitypical
fulfillment of the Passover ordinance itself, which was instituted by God in the days of
the Exodus as a means of making Calvary available by faith to the ancient people of God
even before the coming of Christ.

Note that in 1 Corinthians 5:7 Jesus is referred to as the Passover Lamb for believers:
"Purge out the old leaven, so that you may be a new lump, just as you were
unleavened. For Christ, our Lamb was sacrificed for us." The statement of E. C.
Hoskyns on John 19:14 is very appropriate here: "The hour of the double sacrifice is
drawing near. It is midday. The Passover lambs are being prepared for sacrifice, and the
Lamb of God is likewise sentenced to death" (The Fourth Gospel [London: Farber
and Farber, 1940], ad. loc.). It simply needs to be pointed out that the lambs referred to
here are not those that were slaughtered and eaten in private homes-a rite Jesus had
already observed with His disciples the night before ("Maundy Thursday")- but
the lambs to be offered on the altar of the Lord on behalf of the whole nation of
Israel. (For the household observance on the evening of the fourteenth of Abib, cf. Exod.
12:6; for the public sacrifice on the altar, cf. Exod. 12:16-17; Lev. 23:4-8; 2 Chron.
30:15-19; 35:11-16. These were all known as Passover sacrifices, since they were presented
during Passover week.)

Thus it turns out that there has been a simple misunderstanding of the phrase paraskeue
tou pascha that has occasioned such perplexity that even Guthrie (New Bible
Commentary, p. 964) deduced an original error, for which he had no solution to offer.
The various ingenious explanations offered by others, that Christ held His personal
Passover a night early, knowing that He would be crucified before the evening of the
fourteenth; that Christ and His movement held to a different calendar, reckoning the
fourteenth to be a day earlier than the calendar of the official Jerusalem priesthood;
or that He was following a revised calendar observed by the Essenes at Qumran-all these
theories are quite improbable and altogether unnecessary. There is no contradiction
whatever between John and the Synoptics as to the day on which Christ died 
it was Friday. (Archer, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties
[Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, MI, 1982], pp. 375-376)

Third, I would like you to know that Paul wrote before Mattkhew, Mark and Luke, and he speaks of Jesus as our passover in 1 Corinthians 15. So John was not evolving the synoptic gospels into a new theology on Jesus, because this idea of Jesus being the lamb of God was around before. Just because Matthew didn't mention the exact terminologies associated with passover regarding Jesus doesn't prove he didn't believe it. He himself understood that Jesus had to die for us in Matt 20:28 and other passages. So did Mark and Luke. So they all believed he would die for us in replacement of animal sacrifices. So they all agree on Jesus role here. You have no point.

Remember what Jesus says when people want to stone a woman- let he who is without sin throw the first stone.

In this argument about the writings of John etc. I do not see how this makes Christian faith wrong in the eyes of Muslims. The Quran has a history of revisions and different versions, many writers, etc. and it took centuries to come up with a few versions that exist today. There are 4 slightly different versions today used in different parts of the world. So Muslims cannot say that their book is perfect and reflects the exact words of Muhammed. So if it is so critical, then Christianity and Islam are both wrong. There is no God. It is all man made. That is the logical conclusion of your challenge.

So what is more constructive is to discern the message, not pick it apart from a legal standpoint and try to cast doubt and negative judgement on it. That will not solve anything.

Anyway it is not a difficult concept. There is God, who went into Jesus so we could see an example of perfection, and there is the holy spirit that is available for all of us. The holy spirit comes from God also. These three elements make up the trinity, which is a way to view these three important elements. Maybe there is another that could be added too? Prayer? Worship? Does it matter?

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